The Rationality of Punishment — Measuring the Severity of Crimes: An AHP-Based Orders-of-Magnitude Approach

We propose an innovative AHP-based model to assess the severity of the harms a criminal commits to society in a comprehensive and coherent way. Different from the traditional approach of structuring alternatives into one level, we organize the alternatives into multiple levels of that hierarchy. This arrangement and evaluation of alternatives differs from one criterion to another, which adds to the sophistication of the task when assessing numerous heterogeneous criminal activities. Structuring multifaceted decisions with the proposed model enables us to better deal with its inherent complexity. Our approach can systematically tackle problems of widespread orders of magnitude of criteria and alternatives. When the sizes are actually very small or very large, the accuracy of rating alternatives one at a time is very low. With the proposed method, we are able to obtain priorities with greater precision.